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WINTER
TRANSIT
Snow-dots
printed on the cold;
a puffed-up robin on a fence;
the
near garden wild with old
vegetable irrelevance;
A
move inside the barren twigs
as bird bolts in then leaves be
a
springing of little spars and rigs
on a sea bottom drained of sea;
a
whiteness on the silent green
of yew in which two squirrels run;
a
clothes-line under which, clean,
hangs an empty phenomenon;
such
is the time, such is the day
for you, friend, at your last hold,
condemned,
this wintertime your way
through terminal disease to cold.
Such
is the land of in between
in which a ghost-shape, waiting, words
the
timeless yew’s and ivy’s green—
no move, no sound, except of birds:
a
doing-nothing ghost, unless
it tremble with the nothing, far
into
the white wild, and cannot guess
that boys ganged in the pergola.
One
day birds die. Last Night
falls.
White disappears in a black rain.
No
ghost. A bruised blur
first. Then all’s
a perfect black that will remain,
remain
for a dumb eternity
for all poor melted ghosts.
Spring will
bud,
June fuss, autumn’s debris
confuse with nostalgias, and thrill.
New
birds will come. But under
the leaves
the bones that wait will wait in vain.
No
voice of ours will quick them. Grieves
the heart? It may
do. Come again
the
heart will not. Threading
the boughs
other birds, boys, there will be.
One
may
feel as we do: a mind may house
thoughts that through our lives have run.
We
contemplate the cold. What must
be left we’ll leave. Here
is the fence
on
which the snow builds; here is the crust
the birds peck for last sustenance.
Snow
dots and prints upon the cold
clear air that works upon the world.
A
wild bird shifts its wild song, doled
from a dark hole, at the darkness hurled.
Alan
Marshfield
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